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IBM's Watson Heads To University

IBM will donate a powerful version of its Watson computing system, a repeat winner on the Jeopardy! quiz program, to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for research and development in big data, analytics and cognitive computing.

Watson has already been put to work in health care, analyzing thousands of pages of the latest medical research, checking patient conditions, suggesting diagnoses and treatments to physicians and recording results. It is also used in financial services.

IBM says that Watson has a unique ability to understand the subtle nuances of human language, sift through vast amounts of data, and provide evidence-based answers to its human users’ questions. Other sophisticated computing systems have tackled the difficult problems of understanding voice and text — Recorded Future, Palantir and Digital Reasoning among them, but with their backing by defense and intelligence agencies one suspects some of their most advanced accomplishments remains out of sight while Watson demonstrated its skills during several performances on a popular TV program.

The Watson system at RPI will have 15 terabytes of memory, roughly the same amount as its Jeopardy! predecessor and will allow 20 users to access it at once. The school is strong in Web science, big data and artificial intelligence, making it a good fit for the first deployment of Watson in an academic institution.

“Access to the Watson system will enable new research in cognitive computing as it relates to a diverse range of scientific and engineering fields,” said Shirley Ann Jackson, president of RPI. “The experience of working on Watson will give our students an advantage as they compete for the best jobs in Big Data, analytics, and cognitive computing,” Gartner estimates that the U.S. will create 1.9 million big data jobs by 2015, making experiences with a cutting edge system like Watson a valuable skill in the marketplace.

As part of a Shared University Research Award granted by IBM Research, the company will provide Rensselaer with Watson hardware, software and support services. IBM is currently commercializing the technology to help organizations quickly analyze vast amounts of up-to-the-minute information.

Several of the members of the Watson development team are RPI graduates. It was one of eight universities that worked with IBM during 20111 on developing the open architecture that let researchers collaborate on the question-answer capabilities that help to power Watson.

The ability to use Watson to answer complex questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy and confidence has enormous potential to improve decision making across a variety of industries from health care, to retail, telecommunications and financial services.

Watson is the latest collaboration between IBM and Rensselaer, the oldest technological university in the U.S. The company and the university have worked together for decades to advance the frontiers of high-performance computing, nanoelectronics, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, and other areas. IBM is a key partner of the Rensselaer supercomputing center, where the Watson hardware will be located.

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